Dropping Names: Problem Stick’s Wayne Newcome on sharing the stage with David Allan Coe
Written by Mike BookeyThe Source Weekly, Wednesday, 10 September 2008Wayne Newcome now leads the local rock band Problem Stick but 25 years
ago he was driving a delivery truck in San Francisco and hating nearly
every song he heard on the radio. It was around this time that he
bought the 45 single of David Allan Coe’s “Willie, Waylon and Me.” Now,
a quarter of a century later, Newcome and Problem Stick take the stage
in an opening slot for Coe’s Midtown Ballroom performance.

“When all
those stupid hair bands came out, I couldn’t stand all that shit. So I
started listening to country music and that’s when I bought my first
David Allan Coe 45,” Newcome says.

Today Newcome is living in Bend, DJing his “Onslaught” radio show on
KPOV (under the name Morgan P. Salvo) and leading what very well might
be one of the city’s strangest bands. Problem Stick’s sound is
intentionally “wrecked,” as Newcome likes to describe the band’s
deliberately messy blend of downright garage rock laced with Sonic
Youth style soundscapes. (“I always wanted to play music that I would
go see,” offers Newcome.) His mix-and-match flannels and layered
T-shirts give him an appearance as intentionally “wrecked” as his music
but is perfectly in line with his giggling personality and
wide-reaching wealth of knowledge – most of which is centered on
obscure music factoids and the idiosyncrasies of D-grade horror films.

Newcome points out that his Silver Moon Brewing solo show on
September 6 took place on David Allan Coe’s 69th birthday. Is this a
sign that Newcome and the legendary country rocker are meant to share a
stage? Nope. But Newcome is pumped to share a stage with the rebellious
and often contentious Coe.

“David Allan Coe to me really is a living legend and I was just glad
to have a chance to play with him. I don’t know, maybe everyone else
was too scared,” he says laughing for what is probably the 45th time in
the last five minutes.

Wayne Newcome - guitarist, singer, director of "Brainman No Die"

Why
in the hell would anyone be scared of a 69-year-old whose handlers
declined a telephone interview with our paper (or any paper for that
matter) on account that he is “close to deaf” and has penned songs with
titles like “Mona Lisa Lost Her Smile?” Well, that’s because Coe also
has an entire record (Nothing Sacred) of tracks with titles so foul we
can’t even print them, has done some serious time in prison and
recorded a project called Rebel Meets Rebel—a surprisingly good
metal-in-cowboy-hats collaboration with the late Dimebag Darrel and
other members of Pantera.

“He’s not going to let anyone forget that he’s been in prison and
that he’s a badass dude,” Newcome says. “He’s got a real
you-wanna-mess-with-me-then-go-ahead thing going on. Man, I wouldn’t
mess with him.”

But Coe’s badassedness hasn’t kept him from rubbing elbows with the
greats of country music. Strangely, you don’t hear his name as often as
the giants of classic country music, even if Coe does everything within
his power to equate himself with more well-known heroes through an
impossibly persistent habit of name dropping.

“He’s kind of a mystery and here’s why,” Newcome says, “He always
seems to be name dropping. But I never hear Kris Kristofferson or
Waylon or Willie dropping David Allan Coe’s name, ya know?”

But one place you do hear Coe’s name is in his own songs – he drops
his own name, all three words of it, in a good number of his tunes.
It’s sort of like station identification, reminding you exactly which
artist you’re listening to.

Newcome won’t be dropping his own name or anyone else’s name when he
and the Stick warm up the Midtown stage on Wednesday night, but he will
be playing songs that he’s amassed through a career that spans three
decades, back to his San Francisco days of his band Ugly Stick, the
music of which he accurately describes as “timeless” and akin to
certain aspects of the Velvet Underground. This is the same band that
Newcome took into a deaf club that was literally a place for deaf
people to “feel music.” Newcome has an endless amount of stories like
this, including but absolutely not limited to the production of his
two-and-a-half-hour-long horror flick, Brainman No Die. After Wednesday
night, he’ll have another story, and it’s called “The Time I Opened for
David Allan Coe.

Honolulu, We Have a Problem: From soothing to raw in four hours
Written by Jeff TrainorThe Source Weekly, Wednesday, 02 January 2008

Problem Stick took over for CPC around 11pm. Whirlwind CPC drummer
Jim Stout donned some pink arm-stockings and stunna shades, downed some
extra beer-fuel and picked up the bass guitar for PS.

Stout’s conversion into loose and rowdy mode was reflective of the
dirty, meaty aesthetic that splatters out of the speakers when
frontman/songwriter/guitarist/keyboard player Wayne Newcome and friends
lay into a sound system. In spite of subtle bubblegum pop, folk and
rockabilly undercurrents, they just don’t come any punker than this.
The band’s patented, outlandishly gory lyrics and all-around
not-so-fresh feeling prompted a handful of crazies – most notably Cable
Turtleneck Man and Midriff Girl – to dance freakout-grade death-waltzes
like the world was about to explode. Tom Waits, meet The Misfits. Long
live atonality. Long live Problem Stick.

This local combo plays what may be the most wrecked rock we’ve heard, and we have to commend them for that - even though we’re extremely frightened of them. Think of them as the They Might Be Giants who went to sick n’ wrong school with Slayer. The Annex, 51 NW Greenwood Ave. 388-1106.

The Source Weekly, June 21, 2007

CD Pre-Review

"If Tom Waits’s mind were quite a bit more twisted than it is now and he took more of a Butthole Surfers via Frank Zappa via GWAR approach to his tunes…he’d probably sound just like Problem Stick’s Wayne Newcome. We fully support getting this “wrecked rock” into the innocent public’s hands, but it should probably be packaged with complimentary antipsychotics. Warning: Do not feed to youngins."